Kashi, Benares, Varanasi

The city's oldest name, Kashi, City of Light, appears in the Mahabharata and in early Buddhist texts as the seat of an ancient kingdom on the Ganges, and archaeological evidence supports settlement stretching back roughly three thousand years, among the longest unbroken urban histories anywhere. Its name Varanasi is usually explained as a compound of the Varuna and Assi, two streams once thought to bound the old town, though the etymology is not settled beyond that general sense.

The city's temples were repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt under successive rulers; the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb demolished the original Vishwanath temple in 1669 and built the Gyanvapi Mosque on part of the site, a juxtaposition, mosque beside the eighteenth century Kashi Vishwanath temple rebuilt nearby under Maratha patronage, that remains a point of legal and political dispute in India today. British colonial administration renamed the city Benares, the form still used in some English sources and in the name Banaras Hindu University, until the Indian government formally restored Varanasi in 1956. Diana Eck's Banaras: City of Light remains a standard modern study of the city across this long and repeatedly renamed history.